Wake County in Crisis Due to Segregationist School Board Majority
The story, Wake County goes to hell, by Bob Geary at IndyWeek.com:
Del Burns' abrupt resignation as Wake County's superintendent of schools made things clear, if they weren't already: The county is in crisis. The Wake school system, lauded as among the best in the nation and an engine for the county's growth, is in mortal danger from the newly elected school board majority and its right-wing backers.
And just in case Wake's more centrist and progressive leaders on the board were thinking that Burns could hold the fort without them (and if that's not what they were thinking, why were they so quiet when all hell was breaking loose?), they were wrong. He couldn't. The new majority wasn't listening to anything he said. But they weren't firing him either.
No, the five in the majority, led by Board Chairman Ron Margiotta, were content to use Burns as a prop—a Potemkin frontman—in a power play disguised as a deliberative review, with his input, of school assignment policies.
That's what Burns meant when he resigned in protest Feb. 15 and said, in one of a series of interviews he gave two days later, "I will not allow myself to be a pawn in political gamesmanship." The new majority's policies, Burns warned, if allowed to take effect, would bal